USB (Universal Serial Bus) is an industry standard developed in the mid-1990s that defines cables, connectors, and protocols used for connection, communication, and power supply between computers and electronic devices.
USB was designed to standardize connections of computer peripherals, such as keyboards, pointing devices, digital cameras, printers, portable media players, disk drives, and network adapters to personal computers, both to communicate and to supply electric power. USB has become commonplace on other devices, such as smartphones, PDAs, and video game consoles, just to name a few examples. USB may be used to replace a variety of other interfaces, such as serial and parallel ports, as well as separate power chargers for portable devices.